Radical media, politics and culture.
December 10, 2003 - 11:31am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Independent Media

hydrarchist writes this from the cover page of the pamphlet P2P Fightsharing produced by the WSIS We Seize! group in Rome.

Seizing -- You Can't Beat the Feeling!

The WSIS positions itself as an opportunity to develop a common vision of an 'information society' and bundles with it a series of promises; a just world; more transparent government; bridging of digital divides. An examination of the material propositions, trade agreeement (WTO, FTAA) realpolitik, and the positions of market dominance and social misery left untouched, and unmentioned, tell a different story.

As communications networks spread information becomes central to both production and the organization of social institutions. But rather than making life easier, informationalization supplements and intensifies production and labor. Spiralling demand for productivity imposes close-quarters labor surveillance; dockers’ movements tracked as they move palettes around a warehouse; the waitress whose orders are memorized and who must balance her float exactly at the end of the shift; the temporary worker assigned to a new data entry office or call center every couple of days. Benefits of digitalization accrue principally to those who have the capital resources and power to capture them, and the fight over the laws regulating the digital sphere is a struggle over the destination of this wealth between global regions and social classes.

December 10, 2003 - 11:14am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"(Not Your Usual) Notes on Miami"
PK and Friends

We did not get arrested and we are not naïve enough to believe Miami was the greatest day of modern-day revolutionary activity. However, in light of the wave of dejected accounts from the streets and the jails and the ensuing reflections, we feel a gaping whole has been left in the analyses of the events in Miami. Enough material has already been generated in the past two weeks concerning both the nasty, deliberate consequences of the FTAA and the police repression during the ministerial. This article will not attempt to analyze, nor undermine, the importance of the former and the existence of the latter. Nor do we encourage the dwelling on or fetishization of mass demonstrations. We feel that in spite of all the negativity, fear, and outrage surrounding the ministerial and its aftermath, there was an exciting, fundamental shift in resistance strategy (and its popular acceptance) that, once realized, cannot be lost. That is what this article will discuss; and that is what needs to be addressed, applauded, and further developed without hesitation.

December 10, 2003 - 11:05am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

Anonymous Comrade writes

"The Parable of Samarra"

John Chuckman, December 9, 2003

Front-page stories announced the greatest battle since the end of combat in Iraq with fifty-four insurgents killed and not an American soldier lost. We were given breathtaking details about two separate, coordinated attacks, the firing of rocket-propelled grenades at American vehicles, and the fact that many of the attackers wore Fedayeen militia uniforms associated with Saddam Hussein. Early reports even claimed eleven insurgents were captured.

December 10, 2003 - 10:45am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Sex

"Michel Foucault and Pornography"

Wendy McElroy

"Feminist scholars, many drawing on the insights
offered by Michel Foucault, have urged us to develop
new ways of thinking and speaking."(1) So write the
editors of the book Analyzing Gender. In their
scholarly work Knowing Women: Feminism and Knowledge,
two different feminist editors explain why the French
philosopher Michel Foucault is quoted extensively
therein: "Foucault's discourse theory and the
'post-structuralist' methods of analysis which depend
on it have become very influential within feminist
studies."(2) Since I have an antipathy to fully
one-third of the words in the preceding sentence, I
tend to screen out such scholarly discussions of
Foucault for the sake of my digestion.

December 9, 2003 - 9:04pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Technology

hydrarchist writes:


"This paper discusses the importance of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) scheduled to take place in December 2003 in Geneva, as well as providing a critique of it, along with a discussion of the apparent advantages of organising a counter-summit like WE SEIZE!"


Which Information Society Are You Talking About?


On the Way to WSIS: We Seize!


George N. Dafermos

0. Doomed Agendas

The World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) is scheduled to take place in the next month (December 10-12, 2003) in Geneva. This much celebrated meeting will supposedly shed light upon the obstacles that the so-called information society faces, and wil discuss ways to deal with them in the most efficient manner for the greater good of all. In a nutshell, the WSIS is the place to be if you're interested in how we all together can widen authentic civic engagement in matters rooted in the epicentre of the information society.

December 9, 2003 - 2:54pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

An anonymous coward writes:

The Libre Manifesto

A constellation of interests is now seeking to increase their ownership and control of creativity. They tell us that they require new laws and rights that allow them to control concepts and ideas and protect them from exploitation. They say that this will enrich our lives, create new products and safeguard the possibility of future prosperity. But this is an absolute disaster for creativity, whose health depends on an ongoing, free and open conversation between ideas from the past and the present.

— In response, we wish to defend the idea of a creative sphere of concepts and ideas that are free from ownership.(1)

December 8, 2003 - 5:16pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

nolympics submits:

"Extraordinary Times:

Dissent and the New Model of Homeland Defense"
J Pupovac, December 1, 2003

Miami is the land of opportunity for your typical South American drug king pin, the narcotics agent that spent years pursuing him and the flaming Cuban salsa instructor he had an affair with years ago. So why does a middle-class, white suburban activist chick have such a hard time getting along? Well, I'll tell you why. The activist is the only one who gives a damn about the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a hemispheric trade agreement that seeks to expand NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), a botched plan for trade "liberalization" that has had a devastating effect on the working class of Mexico, the US and Canada.

December 8, 2003 - 11:28am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

jim writes:

"Beyond Miami: The Future of the ACG Movement"

Matt Gaines

There are several ways to look at what happened in Miami recently
during the anti-FTAA demonstrations that took place there from November
19th-21st, 2003. No matter how the event is interpreted, however, it must
first and foremost be remembered that the FTAA has not yet been stopped. It
still remains a looming possibility. Trade ministers, although they ended
the meetings earlier than originally scheduled, refused to call it quits
altogether, and unlike many predicated, what occurred in Miami was not
another Cancun. The real significance of Miami was, more than anything
else, how it revealed the true nature of this wider movement that is
dedicated to opposing all forms of corporate power and achieving global
social, economic, and environmental justice.

December 2, 2003 - 12:05pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Technology

"The End of Oil"

George Monbiot, London Guardian, Tuesday December 2, 2003

The oil industry is buzzing. On Thursday, the government approved the
development of the biggest deposit discovered in British territory for at
least 10 years. Everywhere we are told that this is a "huge" find, which
dispels the idea that North Sea oil is in terminal decline. You begin to
recognise how serious the human predicament has become when you discover
that this "huge" new field will supply the world with oil for five and a
quarter days.

December 2, 2003 - 8:16am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Derrida's Deconstruction of Authority"

Saul Newman

The political aspect of Jacques Derrida's thinking, in particular his critique of authority, has been somewhat neglected. However his interrogation of rational and essentialist structures in philosophy makes his work crucial to any contemporary critique of political institutions and discourses, and indeed any understanding of radical politics.


Derrida instigates a series of strategies or 'moves' to unmask the suppressed antagonisms and differences within the Western philosophical discourse whose claims to universality, wholeness and lucid self-reflection have been sounded since the time of Plato. His critique has important implications for political theory: his questioning of the claims of philosophy may be applied to the claims of political institutions founded upon them.

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